Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

I was selected as vExpert 2015 in VMWARE for my support on their community.

Thank you 🙂

One of our customer asked me to install and setup software to manage FTP storage via web page. We decided to insall ftp2net free version. I tested it at my testing server and there was no problem at all. At customer server I had problems. Installation went well. But when I tried to log to ftp2net website I received error that connection was refused. I decided to check if Safe mode is on. It was off. Then I checked if PHP restriction allow_url_fopen is on. It was on, so I turned it off. But website still didn’t work. I came to time when I started tcpdump and looked on network interfaces if there is any FTP traffic. There was none. When I tried FTP connection from shell on server, I could connect and I also saw FTP traffic via tcpdump. It was weird. Something blocked initialization of FTP connection for Apache processes.

I found solution after the lunch time 🙂 It was SELinux. It’s security feature for linux kernels. I had to run command:

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

This command disables SELinux protection which protected network connection made by httpd/apache processes.

I wanted to spend 10 minutes on this product, but I spent almost half of the day debugging this issue 🙂

Have a nice day,